


Shoreline

by Prosodi



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Sexual Content, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-31
Updated: 2012-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-30 09:57:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/330484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prosodi/pseuds/Prosodi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Obadiah Stane's relationship with the Starks - before and after Afghanistan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shoreline

They've drunk so much that it's twelve minutes after the fact that someone realizes it's time to toast in the New Year. Obadiah lifts his glass but doesn't even scrape to his feet and Howard kisses Maria on the mouth. She shrieks and laughs and upstairs the baby begins to cry.

"Oh for Christsake."

The housekeeper has the night off so it's Maria that has to peel herself from the couch and grope her way upstairs. When the crying doesn't stop Howard makes a noise in the back of his throat, claws his way to his feet and sways after his wife leaving Obadiah to contemplate half empty bottles and the plan for the new plane rendered in thumbprints on the glass of the coffee table.

It's been January first for, Obadiah looks at the clock, an hour and twenty-one minutes when Maria comes back down the stairs. She is barefoot and her hair is coming down. Obadiah traces the lip of his glass and looks at the ceiling.

"He's passed out," Maria says as she sprawls beside him on the couch. She pulls her feet up.

Obadiah isn't sure if she's talking about Howard or the baby. He doesn't ask, and for a time they sit there in silence with the blue of Maria's dress hem sliding up her knees and the ice melting in their glasses. When he puts her hand on her thigh it's one-thirty in the morning. He;s holding his drink in one hand and beginning to put the other up her skirt when she catches him by the wrist. Her fingers are thin, strong.

She looks him in the eye. "Obie, no."

And so that's the end of it. By one-forty he's in a cab and by January second she doesn't bat an eye at him.

\--

After Tony comes back from Afghanistan, they have sex only once - not counting the blow job that happens later. In the living room Pepper tracks the downswing of the stocks while in Tony's bedroom Obadiah loosens his tie. Tony is sitting on the edge of the bed with his head down between his shoulders like a dog that's run two miles too far which is, Obadiah thinks, satisfying on a gut level. Except Tony lifts his eyes when Obadiah swings close in the dark, fingers outstretched to examine one of the many half-healed cuts on his face and there's nothing that even remotely resembles vulnerability in Tony's eyes, even less when he turns his face slightly and catches Obadiah's probing fingers between his teeth.

Tony tongues the tips of Obadiah's fingers and then lets them go, pulls the t-shirt he's wearing over his head. In the dark room, a sliver of hall light peeping in under the door, the glow of the arc reactor is cold and sterile. Obadiah puts his hand over it, measures it with the curl of his fingers as he pushes Tony back onto the bed.

And it's not about Tony, but then it is. Tony who is a genius, Tony who is so full of himself that Obadiah is amazed - fucking amazed - that anything short of the entire world's energy source can lift the weight of keeping him alive, Tony who thinks he runs the company with his little finger while he makes women come with the other nine.

Obadiah spreads him with three fingers, Tony's back on the sheets and the glow between them: illuminating the tendons of Obadiah's wrist. Later, Obadiah turns tony over. Fucks him for real. Tony bites the crook of his hand between thumb and forefinger when he does it and makes noises through his teeth that Pepper won't hear.

On the ride home in the car, Obadiah traces a circle that spans his fingertips.

\--

It's June and Obadiah has sand in his shoes. A few yards farther Tony, who is nine, stands at the verge of the foaming Rhode Island surf, bent double with sand between his toes and edge after edge of seashell passing under his hands. In Obadiah's shadow, Maria Stark sits in a beach chair with her creamy shoulders bared and her eyes closed.

"How's Howard?" she asks without opening her eyes.

Obadiah hasn't actually talked to him since Howard landed in California, but he'd bet big money that things are getting screwed up and any minute now he'll get a phone call and a summons out West because Howard Stark can build the end of the world, but he couldn't catch the technicalities of zoning laws with a fishing net.

Obadiah puts his hands on his hips, says, "He's fine." He just manages to sound neutral instead of self-satisfied.

Tony, hollow chested with pointed elbows and knees, looks over his shoulder at them. Obadiah squints into the sun and waves. The boy waves back with one hand and balanced in his thumb and forefinger there's a rounded shell.


End file.
